Author: David

I’ve just returned from a local business exhibition with over one hundred small businesses exhibiting. It’s a great place to learn.

Marketing experts like Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham speak about the need to look at businesses outside of your own and learn from what they do well. I must admit that there didn’t seem to be much to learn from what they did well but plenty from what they did badly. These lessons are so much easier to see in a different industry as we are usually too close to our own.

Lesson 1. The need to qualify. Virtually everyone who stopped me failed to find out if I was a qualified prospect. (A qualified prospect is someone who: 1. must be able to buy, 2. must be able to enjoy a benefit, and 3. must be the decision maker)

Here’s an example: A very pleasant man on the Freesat stand proceeded to give me a long spiel about how I needed to have Freesat in my home as it would save me money. “I may not need to subscribe to Sky, particularly if I don’t watch the movies or the football” was his pitch. After about one minute I stopped him and told him that I’ve already got a Freesat receiver (which actually wasn’t true, but it was the only was to stop him). He’d fallen in love so much with his product that he forgotten to fall in love with his clients. Freesat is a High Definition service and I have only just bought a new plasma tv so I simply wont be using Freesat for the foreseeable future. He simply wasted his time with me when he could have been speaking to someone interested (wanting to enjoy a benefit) and ready to buy.

Lesson for us: Have a system in place to make sure prospects are qualified and filter out those who don’t. Many people have dirty carpets…but they don’t care! Or they don’t want to pay premium prices to have them cleaned.

 

Lesson 2. Need for a USP (Unique Selling Proposition). A business owner of a very high-end hi-fi stand caught me looking at his gear. That was enough for him to launch into his pitch. Again he failed to qualify. He simply assumed that I was interested. I bluntly told him that I wasn’t his target market or ideal client as I would never spend that amount of money on hi-fi. He did then explain that they also sold lower-end televisions. So I asked the all-important question: “Why should I do business with you versus your competitors?” His answer was the usual “we give better service; we look after you blah blah blah”.

By coincidence I have just bought a large screen LCD TV which was faulty. I bought it off the internet through Amazon. When I phoned to tell them that it was faulty, it was absolutely no problem at all. They simply asked “would you like it changed or would you like a refund?” No arguments or fuss. I changed it for a plasma TV. Now that’s great service. To just say that you give “better service” is not a compelling reason for a prospect to choose you.

Lesson for us: Make sure we are able to give prospects a compelling reason to discriminate in our favour. This must be specific reasons not just “good service” It must also be different from all our competitors. In our industry we can’t all “give the most thorough cleaning or it’s free” or it’s not unique now is it?

Lesson 3. The need to look the part. A firm of painters and decorators caught my eye because their target market was clearly high-end work. Everything on the stand indicated that they do a quality job except the young man who was sitting there. I can only describe him as unkempt and scruffily dressed with long hair and jeans. Not the sort of person I would want in my house. This is what’s known as an anti-USP because it works against the USP.

Lesson for us: If we are targeting high-end clients make sure that we look and act like they want us to. This includes having our vans clean and tidy, wearing a uniform and saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Make sure that our whole business is congruent with our message.

There is one thing above all else that can determine how successful you can be as a carpet and upholstery cleaner.

That one thing is ‘Positioning’.

According to Jack Trout and Al Ries in their book Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind, ‘positioning’ all takes place in your customers mind. It'’s how the marketplace perceives you.

It’s likely that they already have a view on you and your service. They may think that you’re a ‘budget’ cleaner or a ‘high-end’ cleaner.

If you’re their ‘budget’ cleaner they may be very happy with your service for what they’re paying you. But if they have an insurance claim for example (and someone else is paying the bill) they may choose one of your competitors to do the work because they perceive them to be much better. It doesn’t matter whether they really are or not. In the client’s mind, they are....and that’s all that counts!

So are you viewed as just a carpet cleaner? Or as a consultant who can advise them of how to take care of their furnishings?

A carpet cleaner will only get paid so much. But a consultant, a trusted advisor will get paid much more.

Why is this? Simply put…people value consultants. If you’re taken into Accident and Emergency with severe chest pains and the consultant says “we need to operate immediately”, you don’t say “well, my brother-in-law knows a bit about heart conditions...” You trust his recommendation and go along with it. You’re relieved that you’ve found someone who knows what he’s doing. That’s exactly the same view that you want your clients to have.

But what if you feel that you don’t have this ‘expert’ status?  Then simply appoint yourself as an expert. That doesn’t mean simply pretending to be one. Instead, get all the training you need to become an expert and then convey that to the marketplace.

The best way to do this is to use ‘Education-Based Marketing’. Write reports or other educational material that can be given to interested homeowners that shows them that you are indeed an expert. For example, write an information guide that educates homeowners on why they need to have carpets cleaned regularly and how to choose a reputable carpet cleaner. Don’t make it a sales pitch. Simply present information that the homeowner can learn from and they will automatically view you as the expert. And people are desperate for information to help them make the right decision.

Other strategies could include:

• Having an educational recorded message telephone line.
• Acting with an air of authority (as a doctor addressing a patient) when speaking about their cleaning problems. No hesitating or pausing...just honest, confident advice from a trusted consultant, acting with their best interests at heart.
• Giving the perception of being ‘in demand’. You want your prospects to have the attitude “I’m so glad I’ve found you. Now, how can I get on your waiting list?”

Your ultimate goal should be to position and market your business so that your prospects and customers have no choice but to come to the inescapable and undeniable conclusion that...”I would have to be thinking completely irrationally and be totally out of my mind to even consider doing business with anyone else but you regardless of price or the relationship I have with my current carpet cleaner”

Many carpet cleaners have been panicking as the media constantly talks about the 'recession' here in the UK. After all, carpet cleaning is not exactly a necessity. Homeowners don’t have to have their carpets and upholstery cleaned. So when times are hard, people will spend their money on food, clothing, petrol and maybe a few feel-good items But carpet cleaning?  Hardly...unless you target the right people.

Failure to target is a very common mistake among carpet cleaners. Many feel that ‘everyone with a carpet’ is their potential customer. They often seem more intent on fighting over the scraps at the ‘price-sensitive’ end of the market. So when times get hard as they almost certainly will over the next few months, they find that customers who are more concerned about ‘price’ disappear. They are the first to cut back on non-essentials as they simply don’t have the money. In every market, there are always those who want the cheapest price and there are those who want the best…no matter what it costs.

The easiest way to survive a recession is to target those who are least affected…the high-end residential market. Those who still have a high disposable income.

If a homeowner is spending virtually 100% of their income on ‘necessities’ there’s no money left to pay for carpet cleaning. But to a person who only spends 20% of their income on necessities…they still have a lot left over to spend. These are the ones we want to be targeting.

And there are so many advantages to choosing high-end residential clients for your carpet and upholstery cleaning business.

• You will only work between 8.30am & 4.30pm, Monday to Friday. The cleaning business is notoriously known for unsociable hours. But not if you target high-end residential clients. We only work from 8.30am – 4.30pm at the latest. We rarely work weekends. And if we do, it’s because the job is extremely high paying.
• You don’t have to answer the telephone 24 hours a day. I used to think that it was absolutely necessary to have the telephoned answered by a live person at all times, and especially during ‘office hours.’ While it’s good if you can do this, if you set up your business properly (ie position yourself as a consultant and build a relationship with them), people will leave a message on an answering machine or will phone back later. It’s not ideal, but it sure beats being tied to the telephone in case you miss a work enquiry. I still run my business from home but have a separate business phone line that goes on to answerphone at 5pm every day. And the phone is never answered at weekends. This means you can actually take days off without feeling guilty that the phone’s not being answered.
• Not only that, their carpets are often not very dirty. They are soiled of course, but not like you find at the lower end of the market. We often wonder why they have called us out to clean them. Their carpets also tend to be higher quality and more expensive, therefore it makes sense to them to have them maintained rather than replaced. It’s easier to justify cost of cleaning versus much larger cost of replacement. As we know, higher quality carpets look better after cleaning than cheap synthetics.
• High-end clients tend to be more loyal. Usually they have difficulty finding good tradesman that they feel comfortable with. Now that they have found you – they will stick with you. Unlike commercial carpet cleaning who are always looking for a cheaper price. Or there can be a change of manager. He brings in his old cleaners. Or he decides to flex his muscles by reducing cleaning costs so he can look like a hero to his boss. Many commercial contracts have been lost not due to poor work, but simply a change of management and different ideas.
• High-end residential clients are not as price sensitive. They are generally old enough to have had bad experiences – they know you can always get it cheaper but that you “get what you pay for.” One of my clients used to quote his grandmother - “Buy cheap – buy thrice.” Many of my clients happily spend £400, £500 and more to have their carpets cleaned without batting an eyelid. But of course, it’s all relative. If that figure is but a small part of their disposable income, they are hardly going to be trying to knock you down on price to save a ‘mere’ £50.
• It’s possible to build a relationship with them. This is absolutely critical. The best business relationships are just that...relationships. Transaction buyers hop from supplier to supplier when they have a ‘Sale’...not so with ‘Relationship’ buyers. They trust you as their advisor who wants the best for them.

So, to avoid the recession…just change your customers to better ones.

‘Image Suicide’ is an expression used by marketing legend, the late Gary Halbert. It is so important. Virtually all small businesses do ‘image advertising’ where the impression of the company is more important than anything else. They hope to portray their company image as “professional”.

Yet prospective customers do not care at all about your image or your logo. They only want to know “what’s in it for them.” And that’s what they respond to.

Marketing is like fishing...and you are really ‘fishing’ for customers. Image advertising is like fishing with a big fancy expensive pole and lure.

But what’s more effective? Having a fancy fishing pole with all the bells and whistles or just a simple rod with fat juicy bait on it? Which one do you think will attract more fish? Surely the bait is the most important thing. It’s what the fish really want. They don’t care about the rod at all.

And at the end of the day, you cannot go to your bank and deposit ‘image’...you can only deposit money!

So just how important is your image...that is, ‘getting your name out there’?

I think that the only time that image is important is if it is incongruent with what you’re trying to say to your market and therefore stops people from doing business with you.

I recently took a friend of mine to an emergency NHS dentist. We all know how to identify a dentist...he wears a blue or white gown and looks like a dentist! But this man had a pair of jeans on under his gown. It certainly made me think twice when I saw him. If he’d been a private dentist (ie ‘one you pay for’), I think I would have suggested going elsewhere as his image was simply incongruent with his message. He did not build trust.

So of course you should have a clean van and equipment and professional looking stationery, but still the most important thing as far as the customers is concerned is...“Can I trust you to give me what I want?”

It’s exactly as a CEO of an American airline once said: “If your toilets are dirty it means you don’t maintain you engines properly”. This is the link that a customer makes in his mind whether it’s rational or not. But it’s a link that affects whether they will use you or not!

So what is far more important than ‘getting your name out there’ with image type advertising?

Well, imagine if you could fly over your town and all the houses of people who were thinking of having their carpets cleaned next month lit up. That would be far more valuable to you.

This can be done with ‘lead-generation’ type advertising rather than ‘image’ advertising where prospective customers identify themselves, perhaps by phoning for some free information. After all, this is the bait that they really want. You could then target them with your message with very little waste as they would all be interested. So rather than thinking of ways to ‘get your name out there’ think of ways to ‘get their name in here,’ that is into your database so you can now target them with an opportunity to use your service.

Here’s one of the simplest ways to come up with a profitable promotion that hardly takes any time at all.

Over the past few posts, we’ve seen how important it is to know our numbers...the number of enquiries from a given advert or flyer...the cost of acquiring a new client... how much it costs to get the job from each advert and so on. It’s important to know what’s really going on in your business.

Whereas tracking numbers is important...it’s equally important to monitor that information regularly. It’s a good idea to have this built into a system too, so that you can repeat successful ways of getting clients. And not waste more money on those that don’t.

I have a spreadsheet which tells me the results of each strategy I have used over the past eight years (and there were over 45 last year alone!). I know the cost of delivering my message to my prospects and I know how much revenue it generated to the penny. I then know the Return on Investment (ROI) for each strategy.

In January I was looking for a promotion that I could use to encourage new clients to try us out while it’s quiet. I didn’t mind if I really didn’t make any money at this time of year as I could always ‘work the back-end’ that is I would show a profit when they used us again, hopefully in 12 months or even when they referred us to a friend.

I realised that I had done what so many businesses do...use a strategy that works really well, get a ton of work off of it...and then never use it again! Which is strange really. After all, if you had a machine that consistently paid you out £5 every time you put a pound coin in...how much would you put in? The answer should be “ALL YOU’VE GOT” After all...why wouldn’t you?

I realised that although I had tracked all my numbers, I hadn’t reviewed some of them for some time. And I came across a strategy I hadn’t used for over five years. Last time I used it (in January 2003), it pulled in 88 enquiries in just 3 days! I remember repeatedly having to take the phone off the hook just to be able to enter customers’ details on the computer before the phone rang again.

And yet I’ve never used it since.

I have a system of reviewing all my numbers on a monthly basis but for some reason I just hadn’t noticed this phenomenal strategy.

The lesson? Look back over all your advertising and marketing strategies and see if any of them did really well. If they did – just do it again or roll it out on a larger scale! It’s that simple yet hardly anyone does it.

In last post I looked at the need for a selling system in your business. This time I want to focus on two very important parts of this system. In fact, without them you’re almost certainly leaving money behind on the table that could very easily be yours.

A few weeks ago I was looking for a holiday in Egypt for two weeks this February. I finally found a hotel I wanted, but it took me 2 weeks of procrastinating to finally book it. The reason why is interesting and has a direct bearing on whether or not our prospects will choose us or a competitor to clean their carpets...or even no-one at all!

After finding a hotel I liked, I ‘Googled’ it and looked at different reviews from other holidaymakers who had been there. (eg: tripadvisor.co.uk is an excellent site). But some of the reviews were of concern...”food was not very warm”...”food was repetitive after two weeks”...”staff were rude and unhelpful.”

It instantly stopped me in my tracks.

All buying decisions are emotional and we act in irrational ways at times.  One of the biggest motivators is fear...in this case fear of making a mistake. And it held me up for a couple of weeks from booking my holiday.

This is exactly the same for homeowners who want us to clean their carpets. They are afraid of making a mistake. (Isn’t this why we prefer to have someone recommended to us?). They have heard the horror stories of carpets wet for days, of rapid re-soiling, of shrinkage. They don’t want to make a mistake. They don’t want to pay too much...or too little. They don’t want their friends saying “You paid how much for that! I could have got you that for much less.” Not wanting to be seen to have made a mistake is a very powerful motivator for people NOT to take action now. The more we can remove that fear the more successful we will be at closing the sale.

So what can we do? I eventually booked the hotel after looking at other reviews and realising that the bad reviews were probably not accurate (even the best businesses have bad clients who complain). But what clinched it for me was when my sister-in-law said she had been there, knew the hotel and that it was one of the best in the area. In other words, a good TESTIMONIAL. It gave me the reassurance I needed.

Our customers are no different.

Have you ever had it said to you: “I wasn’t sure about you but then I found out that our neighbour has used you and that’s why I’m booking you.”

What can give them this reassurance so that they feel comfortable making a buying decision? Testimonials and a strong guarantee! They simply remove the fear of making a mistake.

Prospects probably have many questions that they are just not asking...about whether you really will do a good job...really will respect their home...and really are worth the extra cost. And if you are more expensive you need to give them the reasons why, so that they can explain to their friends why they have made the decision they have.

Testimonials and a bold guarantee are an important part of this and should be part of our structured selling system.